Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes Read online

  Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes

  Emily Craig

  With a second CSI spinoff hitting the airwaves this fall, the timing couldn't be better for this intriguing memoir by a leading forensic anthropologist. The only full-time state employee in her field, Craig utilizes her expertise to identify victims from the tiniest remnant of tissue or bone. The author's reputation as an international expert on human anatomy led her to reconstructing faces of the dead from skull fragments to aid the police. Her credentials involved her in many notorious cases, most notably Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing and the destruction of the World Trade Center. In each instance, her dedication, professionalism and knowledge played key roles; Craig's scientific analysis established that more than one-third of the dead at Waco had died before the fire as a result of a mass murder-suicide by the Branch Davidians. She also rebutted claims that the real bomber of the Murrah Federal Building had died in the explosion by proving that a mysterious severed limb actually belonged to a victim. Despite occasional gratuitous gross-out details concerning maggots, Craig does a good job of explaining her science to the layperson and portraying the nitty-gritty everyday realities of her job.

  ***

  Teasing Secrets from the Dead is a front-lines story of crime scene investigation at some of the most infamous sites in recent history.

  In this absorbing, surprising, and undeniably compelling book, forensics expert Emily Craig tells her own story of a life spent teasing secrets from the dead.

  Emily Craig has been a witness to history, helping to seek justice for thousands of murder victims, both famous and unknown. It's a personal story that you won't soon forget. Emily first became intrigued by forensics work when, as a respected medical illustrator, she was called in by the local police to create a model of a murder victim's face. Her fascination with that case led to a dramatic midlife career change: She would go back to school to become a forensic anthropologist-and one of the most respected and best-known "bone hunters" in the nation.

  As a student working with the FBI in Waco, Emily helped uncover definitive proof that many of the Branch Davidians had been shot to death before the fire, including their leader, David Koresh, whose bullet-pierced skull she reconstructed with her own hands. Upon graduation, Emily landed a prestigious full-time job as forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, a state with an alarmingly high murder rate and thousands of square miles of rural backcountry, where bodies are dumped and discovered on a regular basis. But even with her work there, Emily has been regularly called to investigations across the country, including the site of the terrorist attack on the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, where a mysterious body part-a dismembered leg-was found at the scene and did not match any of the known

  victims. Throughcareful scientific analysis, Emily was able to help identify the leg's owner, a pivotal piece of evidence that helped convict Timothy McVeigh.

  In September 2001, Emily received a phone call summoning her to New York City, where she directed the night-shift triage at the World Trade Center's body identification site, collaborating with forensics experts from all over the country to collect and identify the remains of September 11 victims.

  From the biggest news stories of our time to stranger-than-true local mysteries, these are unforgettable stories from the case files of Emily Craig's remarkable career.

  Emily Craig

  Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes

  Copyright © 2004 by Emily Craig, Ph.D.

  To my mother, Emily Josephine,

  and to the memory of my father, Reuben.

  These two gave me life and the courage to think for myself.

  And to the victims,

  and the families and friends who loved them.

  Foreword

  by Kathy Reichs, Ph.D.

  I CONFESS. It's a puzzler. After working for years in a profession ignored by the masses, my field is suddenly hot.

  Don't get me wrong. The disinterest in my science wasn't exclusive to the general public. When I completed graduate school, it was the rare cop or prosecutor who had heard of forensic anthropology. My colleagues and I were a small group back then, known to few, understood by fewer.

  Though our numbers have increased over the years, there are still only sixty board-certified practitioners in North America. Along with the military, only a handful of jurisdictions employ full-time anthropologists. The majority of us still serve as external consultants to law enforcement, coroners, and medical examiners.

  But our specialty has come of age. Today every TV viewer in America knows who to call for the skeletal, the burned, the decomposed, the mummified, the mutilated, and the dismembered dead.

  Ironic. Forensic science is hardly new. The first treatise may have been penned in China in the thirteenth century. In Sung Tz'u's The Washing Away of Wrongs, a murder confession is spurred by flies attracted to a bloodstained sickle. Six centuries later, Boston scientist Thomas Dwight documented the use of bones in human identification.

  The FBI recognized the value of forensic anthropology early, calling upon Smithsonian scientists for help with human remains. By the first half of the twentieth century, T. Dale Stewart and others were working for the military, examining the bones of American soldiers killed in war.

  Forensic anthropology became a formally recognized specialty in 1972, when the American Academy of Forensic Sciences created a Physical Anthropology Section. The American Board of Forensic Anthropology was formed shortly thereafter.

  Throughout the seventies, the discipline continued to expand, moving into the investigation of human rights abuses. Spurred by pioneers such as Clyde Snow, anthropologists began digging and setting up labs in Argentina, Guatemala, later Rwanda, Kosovo, and elsewhere. Our role grew in the arena of mass/disaster recovery. Through DMORT (Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team), we worked plane crashes, cemetery floods, bombings, the World Trade Center.

  Still, no one knew our name.

  Cue C.S.I. The breakthrough sleeper scored millions of TV viewers. Forensic science was suddenly hot, and other series soon followed. C.S.I.: Miami. Cold Case. Without a Trace. We'd had Quincy in the seventies, but pathology now dazzled. Crossing Jordan. Da Vinci's Inquest. Autopsy. Even old-timers such as Law and Order and Dateline beefed up on ballistics and Y incisions.

  True-crime mini-docs weren't far behind. American Justice. Body of Evidence. City Confidential. Cold Case Files. Exhibit A. Forensic Evidence. Forensic Factor. FBI Files. All over the airways scientists were slicing and scoping and simulating and solving.

  And literature was right in there. Patricia Cornwell. Jeffrey Deaver. Karin Slaughter. And, of course, Kathy Reichs, with my forensic anthropologist heroine, Temperance Brennan.

  After decades of anonymity, suddenly we are rock stars.

  But the public remains somewhat confused as to the players. What's a pathologist? What's an anthropologist? I am asked the question again and again.

  Many fictional scientists are pathologists-specialists who work with soft tissue. Emily Craig and I are anthropologists-specialists who work with bone. Freshly dead or relatively intact corpse: pathologist. Skeleton in an attic, charred body in a Cessna, bone fragments in a wood chipper: anthropologist. Using skeletal indicators, we address questions of identity, time and manner of death, and postmortem treatment of the corpse.

  And we don't work alone. While TV glamorizes the ind
ividual heroics of the lone scientist or detective, real-life police work involves cooperation. A pathologist may analyze the organs and brain, an entomologist the insects, an odontologist the teeth and dental records, a molecular biologist the DNA, and a ballistics expert the bullets and casings, while the forensic anthropologist examines the bones. Teamwork is essential. In Teasing Secrets from the Dead, Emily accurately portrays the camaraderie and dedication of crime scene technicians, investigative detectives, and lab scientists interacting to solve a case.

  I like to think that my own novels have played some small part in raising public awareness of forensic anthropology. I describe my experiences through my fictional character, Temperance Brennan. In Teasing Secrets from the Dead, Emily does the same. Through Emily. Chapter by chapter she takes you behind the scenes of real-life cases. As the full-time forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky she's had many. As a former medical forensic artist, she's had even more.

  Emily's background is unique. For fifteen years she worked as a medical illustrator, translating the intricacies of bones and joints into sketches and sculpture. She found her way into forensic anthropology through a request for a facial approximation of an unidentified corpse washed up along the Chattahoochee River. She never looked back.

  I've known Emily Craig since she was a Bill Bass graduate student doing research at the University of Tennessee 's “Body Farm.” In 1998 we coauthored a chapter in my book Forensic Osteology: Advances in the Identification of Human Remains. Most recently, Emily and I deployed with DMORT to New York City in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster. While I worked the landfill, Emily worked the ME office. As a veteran of that effort, I appreciate the manner in which her book portrays the dedication of those who took part. The final chapter brought back yet again the horror, the overwhelming sense of mission, and the healing comradeship we all found at Ground Zero.

  When I first heard the proposal for Teasing Secrets from the Dead, I was skeptical. Could Emily's book acquaint readers with the full spectrum of our discipline and not read like a text? Could she accurately describe methodology, yet bring the human side of our work to life? Could she convey a mother's pain over an absent child, a detective's frustration at an unresolved murder, a sheriff's sorrow at the sight of a bullet-ridden toddler?

  The first few chapters put my fears to rest. Teasing Secrets from the Dead offers an honest and absorbing snapshot of our profession. Page by page, Emily allows the reader a glimpse over her shoulder and into her thoughts and feelings. Through her stories she provides an understanding of the difficult, demanding, but profoundly rewarding work of a forensic anthropologist.

  And, perhaps more poignantly, Emily opens a door to herself as woman and scientist, struggling to balance passion, objectivity, and human vulnerability, to maintain humor and grace in a difficult and often heartrending occupation. Teasing Secrets from the Dead captures both the scientific and human sides of forensic anthropology.

  Prologue . The Sting of Death

  I answer the heroic question

  “Death, where is thy sting?” with

  “It is here in my heart and mind and memories.”

  – MAYA ANGELOU

  I HAD ALREADY spent an inordinate amount of time on the victim's eyes, and I was starting to get frustrated. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to make her look alive.

  Early the day before, I'd propped this woman's head up in the middle of my kitchen table, and I'd been working on it ever since. Now it was two a.m.-long past my usual bedtime-but I just couldn't stop.

  Maybe if I worked on another part of the face? I ran my fingers over her cold, smooth cheeks, trying to shake the feeling that her lifeless stare was somehow directed at me. Pressing my thumbs against the soft fold that formed her lower lip, I reshaped her frown into a smile. Then I realized with a start what I had done. After everything she'd gone through, how in the world could I imagine this woman smiling?

  My colleagues and I knew far too little about the woman whose face I was attempting to re-create, but what we did know was chilling. About three months before, her remains had been discovered at Peck's Landing, a recreational spot on the Wisconsin River, near the tiny town of Baraboo. A teenager swimming in the river had found a black duffel bag on a sandbar. Thinking it contained camping equipment, he had pulled it over to the trail along the shore. When he opened it, he discovered a plastic trash bag that had come open just enough to disclose the foul-smelling bloody remains of what he assumed was a dead animal. Disgusted, he dumped the plastic-wrapped remains out onto the trail, hung the duffel bag on a nearby tree, and took off. Investigators would have to track him down later to get his story.

  That same afternoon, two young brothers were out on their usual Sunday hike along the trail with their mother. They'd gone ahead of her and run into the bloody trash bag. Typical kids, they poked at it with sticks until the plastic tore away and exposed the rotting flesh. They, too, assumed the remains must be from an animal, and they eagerly called their mother over to see what they'd found. She swiftly pulled her kids away and called 911.

  When the Sauk County Sheriff's Department determined that the bag contained a human torso, a full-scale search began for additional evidence regarding what was obviously a brutal crime. Over the next few days, searchers found seven more plastic bags full of body parts, each marked with the logo of a local grocery chain. The bags revealed the systematically butchered body parts of a young woman in her twenties-her shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles almost surgically cut apart, her legs literally deboned. She had been decapitated and her skull had been skinned. The face had been completely flayed from the bone.

  Ironically, the very steps that the killer had taken to conceal his victim's identity helped preserve it. The plastic bags, neatly tied shut and thrown into the river, had protected their contents much better than had the remains simply been tossed into the woods. Not only had the plastic prevented maggots and other scavengers from eating the flesh, but the river had acted as a refrigerator, slowing the process of natural rot and decay. This young woman's remains still had a story to tell-if only we knew how to hear it.

  When Sauk County Homicide Detective Joe Welsch first called me for help, he sounded more discouraged than any detective I'd ever talked to.

  “Frankly,” Joe began, “this poor girl has been butchered in a way no one up here has ever seen before.”

  I had the impression that he was young and maybe a little nervous.

  “And then there are all those other cases-that woman they found out in New Hampshire, floating in the New Hampshire River, about ten days before ours. Her body was mutilated, too, just like our victim's.”

  I had also heard about that woman, and I knew that Joe and I were thinking the same thing: serial killer. Such killers are extremely rare, and those of us in the law enforcement community know that they're usually the least likely explanation for any homicide. Still, the sheer brutality of this murder was out of the ordinary. Serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Jack the Ripper seemed unsatisfied to merely kill their victims. The added insult of mutilation or even cannibalism took the act of homicide over the edge of predictable human behavior. This case fit that profile. If Joe had a serial killer in his jurisdiction, he was right to be worried.

  “We've already put one serial killer behind bars up here,” he went on. “And the folks in Chicago have had twelve women dumped on the streets in the past few months. I've talked to the FBI profiler there, and the one in Madison. We're all trying real hard not to jump to any conclusions. But I'd feel a whole lot better if we could just figure out who this woman is.”

  Yes, I thought, the clock was ticking. Every minute that we didn't know who this woman was gave the killer one more minute to cover his tracks-or to plan his next murder.

  Joe read to me from the autopsy report. “Internal organs and brain, all present-but barely recognizable… Teeth all present, and in excellent condition… No identifying scars or tattoos… No evidence
of previously broken bones…” This was the standard medical examiner's checklist, and now I understood just how serious Joe's problem was: Virtually nothing about this young woman's body could be used to tell us who she was.

  “What about fingerprints?” I asked.

  Joe sighed. “Well, we have them, and we don't have them. She had started to decompose by the time we got to her, and after all that time in the water, the skin on her hands was sloughing off.”

  As a result, Joe told me, his fingerprint expert had had to harden the skin by soaking it in formalin. Then he had teased the epidermis away from the victim's fingertips so that the outer layer of skin could be lifted off in one piece, a maneuver known as de-gloving. The resulting epidermal glove offered a kind of ghostly outline of the victim's fingers, allowing Joe's expert to slip his own fingers, one at a time, into the victim's skin. By rolling each of her fingertips onto an inked pad and a white piece of paper, he had somehow managed to lift six readable prints-a remarkably high number.

  “But that's great,” I said. It's so difficult to get fingerprints when remains are badly decomposed that I wondered for a moment why Joe sounded so discouraged. Then he reminded me how frustratingly limited fingerprint information can be.

  “Yes,” Joe said, “but we haven't found any prints that match. You know, when we first got the prints, I thought that all I had to do was enter them into a database. The computer would generate a list of a few missing persons, and bingo! We'd have our woman.”

  Contrary to popular belief, there is no magic formula for matching the fingerprints of unidentified victims to those of missing persons unless the missing person's fingerprints are already on file in a national or international database. The prints of convicted criminals are usually on file with the arresting agency, but if local police or sheriffs don't submit those prints to a national computerized database, investigators in other jurisdictions can't match them to prints from an unidentified person. Even the most specific biological profiles (age, race, sex, stature, weight, hair color, eye color) can match thousands of missing persons. If investigators haven't included dental records or fingerprints in the missing persons reports they file, then each John or Jane Doe who resembles the victim's biological profile must be examined by hand-and either included or excluded as a possible match.